Store Events - March 21, 7:00 p.m.

Jabberwocky Bookshop is pleased to welcome Joshua Kendall for a reading from his marvelous new biography, THE MAN WHO MADE LISTS: LOVE, DEATH, MADNESS, AND THE CREATION OF ROGET’S THESAURUS.

With unprecedented access to family papers and archives, Kendall has brought Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869) to vivid life on the page. He was a polymath, an eccentric, a synonym aficionado and a compulsive list-maker for whom organization was a means of keeping the mental illness that afflicted his family at bay. As colorful as he was complicated, Roget laid claim to more than his groundbreaking thesaurus. His other exploits and achievements include: narrowly avoiding jail in Napoleon’s France; testing the effects of laughing gas on himself for the research of famed physician Thomas Beddoes; and participating in the invention of the slide rule. Roget’s greatest claim to fame, of course, is his Thesaurus, which he first published in London in 1852, and which has sold nearly 40 million copies worldwide.

In a review in the British newspaper THE GLOBE AND MAIL, Simon Winchester, author of THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN, raves, “In THE MAN WHO MADE LISTS: LOVE, DEATH, MADNESS, AND THE CREATION OF ROGET'S THESAURUS, U.S. journalist and word-lover Joshua Kendall tells the life of Peter Mark Roget, thesaurus-maker to the world, and tells it very well indeed…Kendall is a good enough storyteller to keep the pages turning.”